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If you are going to buy fish online, go with liveaquaria.com. They are more expensive for the actual fish but when shipping comes in it will be WAY cheaper. I think they charge like $35 for orders under $100 but it is overnight shipping. I ordered 8 olive nerite snails and 6 SAEs from them and I love them. I haven't had a chance to ID them yet to be sure, but they do eat BBA.

Good luck catching them!!!! They are faster than the fastest speeding bullets!

Haha. That reminds me when I got mine from the LFS, they all hovered there all twitchy and then the guy tried to catch them. It took him a good 15 minutes to get 3 of them out for me, and that was after tearing out all of the potted plants and other decorations and moving them to the tank next to it.

I don't like buying from the big online sites in general, they seem to be overpriced in most everything. $35 for overnight shipping is actually about average (30-35) and if you go with an online site in the same state as you, they can probably get a discount on shipping, overnight for same-state (small package) is often about 20 bucks.

Is was lucky enough to find SAEs at my LFS for under $3/ea. They're the real deal based on what I've researched online. Awesome fish. Very active and fun to watch. They're constantly grazing on my algae'd-up tank, but they also much flake-food as eagerly as the others in their 55g home. They also much away at what ever blanched veggies I drop in for the mystery snails. I've got 3 SAEs.

Definitely don't look like CAEs to me, which are the biggest trouble makers out of the group...

But flying foxes are different than SAE's though, and it's rather annoying that the seller has listed both "flying fox" and "Crossocheilus siamensis." I'd say the pics in the link look more like a Crossocheilus species than the former.

As I mentioned way, way back in this thread I purchased what was originally IDed as "flying foxes" and they were a bit crazy (not aggressive, but boisterous) and not too keen for BBA...liked snagging any prepared food I added. I never got a good ID on them though and eventually returned to the LFS as they weren't what I wanted...but in any case, I wouldn't necessarily count on them being a quick fix for BBA, especially if they aren't true SAEs, but should not cause problems like CAEs can.

When shopping around for SAEs you're likely going to run into these problems everywhere unless you're dealing with someone who can ID within the genus themselves and they know for a fact what they are selling you...and that's a hard task over aquabid, unfortunately. Depending on the size of the seller they may just be passing along information from the breeder/wholesaler which could be misIDed or have "contamination" from collecting at a site where multiple species coexist (although I honestly don't know how often these are wild collected vs. captive bred). And I wouldn't even doubt that many are unaware that there are different Crossocheilus species to begin with...

I guess it depends though on what you're looking for. Like I said, even flying foxes aren't exactly bad tankmates. Just that other species aren't the best at getting at BBA and apparently some may eat mosses.

Hmmm. Love how you actually took time and identified each one. I read upon the differences once through Wiki as they do state that there are different "types" of the Siamese Algae Eater. The information added with the Photos were -I felt- the most important b/c you can describe anything to anyone with the most information you have and still have them purchase you something exactly opposite.. but if you show them how it looks like... it clears so many questions.

I know this thread was 4 years ago but, its something ALL SAE keepers should and need to read upon.

One xtra note! I do not remember reading it in your initial post about the diff in SAE's... but if you have noticed some "SAE's" have different width of their black band that stretches from mouth to tail. The more common ones I see are the SAE's with the larger width bands. The ones I have are the SAE's with the more thinner width bands. Or perhaps it could be due to age difference since mine are only 2.5 inches long. Then that defeats my small incite.